December 2006 - Posts
I spent a rather interesting day at Microsoft , Reading at the Grey Matter Architect Forum. The focus of todays sessions was all about how other companies/partners are using VSTS and extending it. Heres some of my thoughts on the sessions today and on some of the things that sort of emerged along the way (at least, in my mind).
(1) MSF and VSTS: The session was by far too short. Alan Cameron Wills is a very engaging speaker and this talk came across very well. The first half was familiar territory since i have been looking at VSTS since TechEd 2004 and started using it recently. It was good to see that MSF is getting into the Factories space so that the process guidance can be tailored to fit with the factory approach. It would have been good to delve into more detail about what MS's plans are but we didnt have enough time. There were a couple of things that came up in the Q&A session at the end where Alan indicated that the CMMI template will have enhancements because MS is working with SEI to make things better. I gather that some extra stuff will also turn up in the Agile template. He did make a good point that we arent really expected to use the entire process template as is and that most companies will resort to customizing it in one form or another. As such, the out of the box templates are only a starting point, and they dont claim to be the final word on how you implement your process, so whatever enhancements MS provides would be cool but not something that should stop us from getting on with things now. Although the process templates are customizable, i gather (from other articles and books) that in the currentl scenario, this is not for the faint of heart. MSF is moving to a more 'composable' approach where instead of siloed "Agile" or "CMMI" templates, there will be a solid catalog of practices to choose from to make the process you want. There, of course, needs to be validation to check that we dont come up with some weird unworkable combination of practices.
I like the way VSTS chucks a ton of work items at you when you instantiate a team project. It gave me a lot of food for thought when starting a recent project. Its quite common to look down the list and think "Ooops!! forgot to sort that task out" so it helps keep you honest and on track. One thing I personally would like to see is "
Project Profiles". What i mean is this: if you take a large SOA project, when you instantiate it in CMMI and Agile (for instance, SCRUM) , what does the guidance look like? how does it differ amongst the two templates? what do the out of the box iterations look like? what do they say you should focus on first and what you should avoid? Similarly how about a B2B or a B2C project? what are the best practices there? when should we rely on the factories and when should we look elsewhere? This would be very helpful in figuring out which approach you want to take for your particular project. I guess that for very experienced architects the answers would be obvious, but this would be a solid fallback and a guide/checklist for those of us who arent exactly gurus in this.
(2) SCRUM and VSTS: Colin Bird from Conchango presented this. As quite a few people know, Conchango developed a SCRUM plugin for VSTS (collaborating with Ken Schwaber). Actually I didnt know it was free till today. Now i gotta go download it !! It was quite a dep talk on how to scale Agile with VSTS. Since I am not all that familar with Scrum (i mean i know what Sprints are etc but not very much more), i cant really comment on the content but it was quite interesting to hear what they have learned from large projects (some distributed and some co-located). These talks make me feel rather wistful sometimes. I wish I could be in a project where you can just have a quick/solid planning workshop and then go heads down in development while someone sorts out the impediments for you. If things arent fitting in the sprint, re-prioritise with the involvement of the client and move it to the next sprint. Wow!! I've heard this from many people including some of my friends who've worked with companies that are very heavily into Agile methodologies (names withheld). This has never happened to me. Its always been the case that my clients want the stuff done fixed price and they have commercial deadlines so they have to know when we are going live before we start!! Im sure im not alone in this!!
(3) Select Perspective: Rather all-encompassing toolset. I've heard a lot about it so it was good to see a demo. I did however disagree with the label "agile" applied to it by the speaker. I will agree that its adaptable and that we need to be more adaptable and flexible in the way we pick our processes and practices for the type of project at hand and it that sense the toolset with its collected "executable wisdom" helps us to be "agile", but this much of a modelling heavy environment surely cannot be a proper "agile" candidate can it? Isnt one of the main principles of agile to focus on working code rather than heavy documentation and models? If we spend so much time working out various architecture models then wheres the code? which stakeholder is going to pay for pictures? Now dont get me wrong. I'm all for setting out a blueprint before coding and detest the cowboys who plunge into code without a thought to the overall architecture.(okay, so if the whiteboard or the metaphor is enough and your stakeholders are happy with that, go for it!) My clients need to know how the system is broadly going to function and what the moving pieces look like at a high level and in my opinion any architect worth his or her salt who has worked in a particular domain for a while should be able to provide this info without having to first write a hundred unit tests and all the code for it. And im sure that the MDA camp would say "yeah, but spend time on the PIM and push the magic button and voila, its the PSM/code, so you havent wasted any time making that nice pretty UML model ". Something doesnt feel right to me. However, im not slagging off the toolset per-se. It looks quite solid and very formal risk averse environments would enjoy using things like that. I just dont think it should be labelled "agile".
(4) Essential Unified Process: Star Wars!! The Empire strikes back!! It looks like this is the return of the unified process albeit in a more "developer friendly" way. Take heart young Jedi, your process guardian is near!! IMO, the most outstanding thing (which unfortunately was only alluded to and not demonstrated) was the "intelligent agents", your persona/role buddies who can take on some of your workload in producing/reviewing artifacts etc, but otherwise nothing really stood out. Sure, its looks cool that you now have electronic storycards in VSTS and its nice to know that all the process vendors recognise that people are going to mix and match and are opening up their toolsets to allow this. IMO, this is a big plus and boost for Microsoft (but thats a post for another day). But for the folks who like the EssUP approach and who are investing in VSTS, this integration is sure to mean a great deal.
Now, how many feathers have i ruffled today?
For a change I'll get off my Biztalk and BizUnit Soapbox and write about different things.
(1) First up is the
Web Service Software Factory: Just downloaded it a couple of days ago and watched Don Smiths webcast. I must say its brilliant stuff. I've been using WSCF for a while but that just builds the ASMX facade (and does a pretty good job of it too). I've been looking for something that could go all the way down through the layers and into the database and it looks like i've finally found it. It was interesting the way we can either generate the business objects from the tables if we already had a database as well as generate database entities from the classes (he didnt actually show this but theres a menu option i need to explore). Its also good that we can collapse the code into a single project if needed instead of having 6 separate projects (although I prefer the latter). It's use of Enterprise Library was also good.There was some
controversy earlier about the patterns it uses, but IMO it does an excellent job and if you dont like the patterns, change the T4 templates and use whatever pattern rocks your boat!
(2) Next up is
EasyObjects and MyGeneration : Very impressed with this too. It took hardly 3 minutes to generate all the CRUD stored procedures and the business tier AND use Enterprise Library. Decent stored procs and decent code. Wasnt too comfortable that the abstract business classes had an underscore to start their name, but im sure that can be changed in the template. The thing is CRUD is usually quite simple and it would be interesting to see how it works with custom stored procedures that act on more than one table. What happens to the class corresponding to this new composite SP in terms of the object model and its relationship to other classes? Does the design still remain valid OO (although some purists might argue that if we are generating from the db then we are hardly doing actual OO, rather we are in a data driven object world). Wonder what you folk think about this?
(3) Third up is
SubSonic: I finished the introductory webcast to Subsonic just about 10 minutes ago and was nearly blown away by its simplicity. The BuildProvider with the classes all hiding in the background seemed rather like magic. I was on more comfortable ground with the class generator and batch class generators actually as that can be used to build an entire Domain layer or Business Logic layer. The scaffolding for "admin" screens is also really nifty. Since this is inspired by RAILS, i think i better start looking at Rails myself. It must be really something, just reading about it on blog articles at various sites and finding how people are going crazy over it. I have pinged the owners to see if we can get a strong named version of the ActionPack DLL so i can use it in my Biztalk projects when i need to call out to custom class libraries since BTS needs stuff to be strong named and placed in the GAC.
Im now rubbing my hands in glee. More toys for Christmas!! Now which shall I choose for my long term work? Since my immediate project is in .NET 1.1 and BTS 2004 , EasyObjects is the only one i can use. However, there are some other projects kicking off in .NET 2.0 /BTS 2006 as well, so i can move into the WSSF for the services and then use SubSonic for the general business+data components and possibly in the ASP.NET apps as well, although it will run into strong competition in this area (at least in my projects if not amongst the general populace) when the Web Client Factory is released. IMO, Subsonic is definitely more lightweight but it isnt a complete factory either. WCSF needs us to use workflow foundation for complex page flows so it seems more suited for the complex heavy hitting apps, but lets see how it turns out.
If you havent seen these tools in action, do check them out. The WSSF webcast is only an hour, EasyObjects takes a few mins and the Subsonic webcast is 20 mins.. In 2 hours you can have more options at your disposal than days of researching!! Enjoy!!
I've just made an update to the R1 BETA release. Now instead of the multiple MSI's, the source code is packaged in a simple zip file and the bindings to source control have been removed. This should make this easier to use in your own directory structures. Also note that the Altova XML package has been removed from this download although it is still a pre-requisite to compile the package. If you do not wish to use AltovaXMlLremove the step from your copy of the source code.
I've finally made a release of BizUnitExtensions. R1 BETA is targeted at Biztalk 2004. It consists of the core BizUnit product (source and tests) as well as the Extensions (source and tests). The core code base has been bug fixed (for all steps we used in our projects). The tests for the core code base have been completely revamped. All XML comments were thoroughly revised (again, this was done only for steps that we used and we fixed warnings in all other files as well).
If you want to run the provided unit tests please remember that the unit tests are provided as a indicative sample of what may be achieved and not guaranteed to run on your machines. This is because unlike NUnit tests which test the assembly in question and can be assisted by mock libraries, the BizUnit assemblies actually control real orchestrations and other Biztalk artifacts which it is impossible to mock and provide.
The core product for v2006 comes with a sample solution but the v2004 does not (we inherited these products and only bug fixed the code where necessary) so dont accuse us of inconsistency!!We have run a couple of the test steps against the SDK samples and the documentation indicates which these are and you should have them deployed first before using the tests.
The main thing is that the product works for all the steps we used (and there were quite a few that we used). But we didnt use ALL of the steps so it is quite possible that there are still some errors in the code base. Do report them and we will try and fix them. Or alternately if you can step through the code (which is very easy to understand) and provide a fix (and possibly a unit test-if it does not depend on your project assemblies) that would be very useful and we will include that in the code base.
As soon as a few people have used this and are happy that the product basically installs and works fine, we will upgrade it to the RTM release and barring bug fixes, we should be concentrating on v2006 after that, but 2004 WILL NOT be abandoned.
The changes to the core prooduct in v2006 would be a bit of a challenge because we have to merge our fixes from 2004 into the stuff that Kevin has written in 2006 and not lose any fixes he might have made.
We have fairly amibitious plans for v2006 including tests against the official MS tutorial scenarios that are more in-depth as well as some good tutorials based on our projects (without any confidential info of course), so please do support this effort. Theres actually a lot more on the cards, but we will reveal that when we make more concrete progress.
Another thing which would be useful for the community is people writing in to let us know how you are using BizUnit in your projects. Even if you cannot contribute code and support tools (for IPR and other reasons) it would be nice to know how its being used out there.